ABI Research forecasts 40 per cent growth in biometrics by 2021

ABI Research claims that the latest security trends driving the global biometrics industry will result in a market worth more than $30 billion by 2021, which would be an increase of around 118 per cent from 2015.

The market demand for biometric sensors in consumer electronics, particularly smartphones, is a result of increasing consumer's security awareness. Devices equipped with embedded fingerprint sensors and similar techologies are expected to hit the two billion shipment mark by 2021, a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 40 per cent.

ABI Research suggests that research shows biometrics will primarily occur in banking and personal finance, followed by the governmental and security sectors. However, that will require a whole range of biometric indicators to be considered, such as voice recognition for call centres, iris and ear recognition for ATMs and smartphone applications and perhaps fingerprints and vein indicators for identification on personal devices.

As reported in Digitimes, Mastercard lead the way with multimodal technologies and is concentrating on facial recognition, despite this being one of the least effective methods to date, with very high instances of false negatives as computer algorithms are simply nowhere near as good as humans at recognising faces. And this is the underlying problem with biometrics, it is easy to train a consumer device to match against a very limited number of samples, however when we consider large scale systems, such as airport immigration then training algorithms becomes a very onerous task.

Despite this, Dimitrios Pavlakis, research analyst at ABI Research said, "Consumers are increasingly putting their trust behind biometric-based authentication and searching for security, convenience, and personalisation in multiple layers.

"Surveillance is also gearing up, and by 2021, we anticipate more than one in three surveillance cameras shipped to be IP-connected cameras. This will undoubtedly open up new pathways for facial biometrics and surveillance analytics."